20th-century Essayist Quotes

Salman Rushdie

William S. Burroughs

Herta Müller

Osip Mandelstam

Christa Wolf

Chuck Palahniuk

Arundhati Roy

It is amazing how nice people are to you when they know you are going away.

We don't all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us. Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct.

Girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.

Nicholson Baker

Someone did us all a grave injustice by implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what concerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.

I remember the time I said, 'I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.'

In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.

New York is a woman
holding, according to history,
a rag called liberty with one hand
and strangling the earth with the other.

Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'

You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you've even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. For here to there it's all just the farty sputter of lantern. And they call that having lived. It's not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.

It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing—it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human species is based on.

Proudhon was a voluntary hermit in the political world of the nineteenth century. He sought no followers, indignantly rebuffed suggestions that he had created as system of any kind, and almost certainly rejoiced in the fact that he accepted the title anarchist in virtual isolation.

George Woodcock

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

I'm not interested in plots. I'm interested only in the characterization of people and what they do.

Erskine Caldwell

It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: 'Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!

I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Is this not in fact the purpose of young Americans going abroad? To make them think of things they never thought of?

In his final remarks to the White House staff, on the day he resigned his office, Nixon applied a version of the lesson to himself. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.

Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.

Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

Life is shapeless, but art, as everybody knows, is shaped.

As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

DeMaistre and Bonald … wanted to teach men submission, to give them the religion of established power, to substitute, in Bonald's phrase, the evidence of authority for the authority of evidence.

Alain Finkielkraut